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}}</ref> Gairdner's father died in 1928, when Gairdner was 17 years of age.
Gairdner attended Kelvinside Academy, Glasgow Dragon School, Oxford; and Gresham's School, Holt, Norfolk|Holt.<ref name="obit" /> He went to school with W. H. Auden and Benjamin Britten and sang madrigals with classmate Peter Pears.<ref name="obit" />
He read chemistry at the University of Oxford but switched to medicine, did clinical training at Middlesex Hospital and was awarded his Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery Degree in 1936.<ref name="obit" /> He did his residency (house physician) in paediatrics at The Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street in Bloomsbury, London in 1937-8.<ref name="obit" /><ref name="spence" /> Gairdner described his experience there in a memoir written a half-century later. He wrote, "I recall the sheer enjoyment of working there, but also the periods of overwhelming exhaustion."<ref>{{REFjournal